my suitcase heart

photos by josh dookhie.

A few nights before the wedding, I was in the garage until 3 AM, organizing and labeling all our boxes of stuff for the wedding. I worried about how this was going to all come together. Was it going to look like a garage sale? Would it have a cohesive look? Would all our hours of hard work be worth it?

Well, I worried for naught. The reception was crafty, magical, and beautiful. It was like a huge, wonderful dinner party with all our very best friends and family. We ate delicious food, laughed so hard during speeches, and danced up a storm during the crazy dance party.

I remember sitting at our little table for two (pictured above) right after we finished dinner and thinking, "I need to remember all of this. Every little detail. This is exactly what we wanted!" It was just so dream-like.

So, I am so excited to share this all with you. First, I'll explain some details, and then I'll show you heaps & heaps of photos of our favourite evening ever.

First up, our amazing seating chart. We came up with the idea together, but Mike executed the idea perfectly all by himself. Here's how it worked:

We collected over 25 different brass animals (from thrift stores and garage sales). It was quite the treasure hunt all summer. But we did it! We had an owl, a swan, a duck, a horse, a lion, and a snail to name just a few. Each table had a brass animal on it. To find out where you sat, you looked for your name (listed alphabetically) on the seating chart. As you can see, each name card also has a hand-drawn (by Mike) animal on it. You then had to go and find the brass animal that matched the drawing on your place card.

Mike tied each of the namecards to a old wire gate that came from my grandparents farm in Iowa. My grandma was just bewildered that we wanted to use her old "farm junk" at our wedding. We actually ended up using quite a few items from the farm!

Mike (ever the electrician) also hooked up some cool lights to that chart so that it was perfectly illuminated!

Quite a few people told me that doing my own flowers would be too stressful. So I decided to compromise and have a florist do my bouquet and the boutonnières. I wanted to do the vases on the table myself, so we got those flowers from her supplier.

We got all the flowers from the florist on the Thursday before the wedding and stored them in buckets of water in my in-laws crazy cold basement. Friday morning, a bunch of us ladies got together and put all the bouquets together. I had chosen a variety of white, yellow, and green flowers.

After all the vases were filled, we stored them again in the basement until Saturday around one. Some family brought them over to the church and set them out on the tables before the ceremony. Each table had about three or four little vases on it. It just looked so pretty!

My friends and I love baking, so I knew that I absolutely didn't want to pay someone else to do it. My friends graciously helped me bake up a storm the Wednesday before the wedding. My sister-in-law also made three beautiful cakes and dozens of cupcakes. We stored all desserts in fridges and freezers at our place. In between the ceremony and reception, my friends drove to our place and grabbed all the desserts and set them up.

Mike made fantastic labels for each of the desserts. I made the little cupcake toppers and the cake bunting.

We hauled in three pieces of furniture for the dessert "table". My mom helped paint the two dressers white. My mom also collected over a hundred vintage plates and forks.   This gives you a bit of an idea of what they looked like all together.

It was mighty tricky estimating how many desserts we needed, but I think it turned out well! Almost everything was polished off! Always a good sign :)

That's it for details. If you have questions about anything else, just ask in a comment & I'll respond there.

Thank you so much for sticking through all these wedding posts and for leaving such lovely, kind comments. You all are so kind!!

xoxo